Julie Taymor’s “The Tempest”

The old Russian saying “You can’t ruin kasha with butter” (which I heard from the sage artists Komar and Melamid) comes to mind upon viewing Julie Taymor’s “The Tempest,” David Denby’s review of which (available to subscribers) is in the current issue. You can’t ruin “The Tempest” with Shakespeare, and Taymor gives us Shakespeare. Though the whole play isn’t there, it’s boiled down intelligently and generously, and she doesn’t digress from the glorious poetry into much stage (or screen) business or parallel flourishes. The actors acquit themselves honorably; the switch of Prospero to Prospera (a role taken by Helen Mirren) does the play no violence; and, as Gonzalo, Tom Conti speaks his part with a thrilling discursive directness akin to James Mason’s in the role of Brutus in Joseph Mankiewicz’s “Julius Caesar.”

But I’m also put in mind of another proverb, one of my own making: that the quality of a movie tends to be inversely proportional to the quality of the literary source on which it’s based. That rule doesn’t hold when (as with Godard’s “King Lear” or Renoir’s “Madame Bovary”) the filmmaker is an artist of comparable importance in the cinema to that of the writer in the literary realm. Unfortunately, where Taymor found much to dramatize with visual flair in “Across the Universe,” her charmingly romantic concretization of Beatles songs, in “The Tempest” she is, for the most part, an illustrator who struggles to come up with visual correlates for the Shakespearean conceits and only rarely adds meaningfully to the experience. (The performances of Russell Brand and Alfred Molina as Trinculo and Stephano are wonders on their own, and Taymor saves the absolute best for last: Prospera’s leave-taking of Caliban (Djimon Hounsou), a static and silent moment, is a brilliant cinematic equivalent for aporia, a real and painful doubt about the possibility of a resolution to the conflict between them, and the underlying issues of race and culture, that the play sets up.

But the biggest problem with the film is that, for all the scenaristic intelligence that Taymor exerts, it’s never clear what Shakespeare and “The Tempest” mean to her. She clearly reveres play and playwright—and her reverence stifles her creativity. The issues of legitimate rule, artistic power, long-awaited revenge, Christian charity, and family heritage (among many other things) that the play unfurls elicit no questions and no challenges from the director. She neither stands up nor pushes back; she takes her Shakespeare as she may have gotten it in school, and the movie she made may well find its way back to school, as an unobjectionable (yet uninspiring) visual aid. It isn’t an artistically significant approach to the play.